Every day, after lunch, I read all of the advice columns in the
Washington Post. I enjoy it when a columnist can see through conflicting
thoughts and feelings to the ones that are most important, and then
guide people to be their best self.

Since I’m having an interpersonal dilemma right now where I’m trying
to sort through conflicting thoughts and feelings, I pretended that I
wrote to an advice columnist. Then I pretended that I wrote the reply.
Oddly enough, it helped.

Dear Type Advisor,

My dear friend, a cheerful, loving ESFP, is having a lot of trouble
in her family. She and her daughter had a quarrel before the holidays,
and now the daughter is not speaking to her. At around the same time, my
friend also quarreled with her husband and walked out on him for
several nights.

I arranged to have lunch with my friend, but she never talked about
the quarrel with the daughter. Instead, she told me that her husband is
systematically trying to make her think she is losing her mind. He is
stealing things from her and replacing them several days later in a
different place from where she had left them. When he denied it, she
told him she didn’t believe him, and he got so angry he chased her down
the hall. She felt she had to leave for a “safe house,” a place she
wasn’t even going to reveal to me.

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this because my friend is notorious
for losing things. It’s something everyone has been teasing her about
for years. The husband is very close to the daughter, but why he would
want to make his wife feel crazy was beyond me.

I’m feeling torn by so many thoughts. I love being around this woman,
because she always makes me feel wanted and admired. I’ve known the
family for 15 years, and from what I saw, she did the same for her
husband and children. She would light up when they came in the room, and
was always 100% on their side. Her daughter was her close friend, and
her husband was good-natured and supportive. It really hurts to see them
all demonizing each other.

The questions I’m asking myself are: Is there anything I can do to
help? Should I even try? Is my friend going crazy, even though she
sounds completely lucid? Is her husband really trying to make her crazy,
even though I’ve never seen him do an unkind thing? Is she lying to me,
her best friend? Should I continue a relationship with someone who
would lie to me, or lie about her husband?

An NF wanting to helpDear NF wanting to help,

You might find some perspective on your ESFP friend in the book Survival Games Personalities Play,
by Eve Delunas. It sounds like your friend feels very threatened by her
daughter’s anger, and that the husband is siding with the daughter.
It’s possible that your friend feels backed into a corner, and is
playing some SP “survival games” to protect her ego, whether or not she
is aware of it.

By putting the spotlight on her husband, she might be distracting
everyone from the possibility that she did anything wrong in her
mothering. She might be using words like “safe house” because it shocks
people, something SPs like to do. Also, it immediately makes her look
like an innocent victim instead of a villain, a role that she feels her
daughter and husband are trying to force her into.

Some SPs who feel threatened can be great con artists, and they are
especially good at conning NFs, so be careful there. It won’t do much
good to confront her about it, because she will probably continue
evading responsibility.

The best thing you can do is to try and make her ego feel less
threatened, so she can stop playing defensive games. Don’t address the
stories she is telling you. Just tell her all the good things you
witnessed her do over the years, as a mother and a wife. Hopefully, it
will help her recover her equilibrium, and deal with her problems more
wisely.

Beyond that, you should resist that NF desire to rush in and save
people. Watch instead as they save themselves, even if it may not be the
way you would want them to.

Editors note: Another good resource is CAPT's Building Better Relationships,
a "Type for Life" guide that provides type-specific insights for
couples, with descriptions of the effects of each of your MBTI
preferences on your relationship.

“What did you do over the weekend?” I asked my daughter. “Well, let’s
see,” she said. “Friday, Rich and I had dinner at an Indian restaurant
called Rasika. We had fried spinach appetizers, black cod with green
curry, garlic naans and truffle naans, duck with anise sauce, fish
curry, black toffee date pudding, cocktails and wine.

“Saturday,
I went with friends to a restaurant called Medium Rare, which
specializes in an amazing sliced steak with a wine cream sauce, and hand
cut frittes on the side. We had a bottle of wine, and ice cream sundaes
for dessert.

“Sunday morning, we had a three hour brunch at a
place called Zengo’s. We had small plates of sushi, a steamed bun filled
with scrambled eggs and bacon, sesame tofu with bok choy, little corn
cakes with pulled braised meat on top called arepas, Nutella waffles,
lobster grits, mimosas, sake sangrias and Bloody Marys.”

“Good grief!” I said. “Why aren’t you as big as a house?”

Believe
it or not, this is a typical weekend for my daughter. She lives in
Washington D.C., which is becoming one of the top cities in the country
for food, and eats out at least once a week in a highly rated
restaurant. I am stunned at the amount of food that she and her crowd
consume in a weekend, and amazed that they’re all still slender.

“No
seriously,” I said. “How do you do you eat so much food without gaining
weight. You have to tell me your secret. You’re not bulimic or anything
like that, are you?”

“It surprises me too,” she said, “but I
don’t gain weight when I eat out. I only gain weight when I’m sitting at
home with a box of crackers. I think it’s because when I eat out, I
don’t eat that much food. I eat a lot of different kinds of food, but
it’s all small servings, and I’m paying so much attention to the food
that I don’t eat a lot.”

“What do you mean, you’re paying attention?” I asked.

“Well,
first I’m looking at the presentation on the plate. When I taste it,
I’m trying to figure out what the ingredients are, and if they go
together well. I’m asking myself if it’s cooked right, if the textures
are right, and if the side dishes and wine complement it.”

"That’s really different from me,” I said. “When I eat out, I only have two thoughts: ‘This is good’, and ‘I want more.”’

I’m
an INFJ and my daughter is an ISFJ. When I’m paying attention, it’s
usually to something abstract, like words or ideas. When she’s paying
attention, it’s usually to something concrete, and her favorite concrete
pleasure is food.

I don’t pay much attention to food. I have
eating habits so I don’t have to think much about it. When I’m eating,
I’m almost always doing something else, like reading, watching TV or
having conversations.

The holidays are big problem though,
because if you’re not paying attention, you’ll gain weight, which like
most people, I do every year. When my daughter told me that she doesn’t
gain weight eating high calorie food simply because she pays attention
to it, I began to wonder if that might work for me.

I did my
first experiment at Thanksgiving when I was handed an apple cider and
champagne cocktail. Instead of letting it rush through my mouth, I held
it there for a few seconds and allowed my taste buds to “take a picture”
of it. I tried to describe it in words, as if I were a food critic. I
identified the wonderful freshness of the apple flavor, and the
sharpness that the champagne added to it. I could tell that the hostess
had added a little cinnamon and orange peel. Since I’m intuitive, I
asked myself what it reminded me of, and remembered a day when we went
to a friend’s farm and put apples through a press. I remembered the big
bucket of gushy peels left over after the juice was squeezed out.

I
tried to do this all through the meal (although it’s difficult when
you’re in company because you’re also paying attention to the
conversation). I noticed that in turkey stuffing, the ingredients stand
out in interesting textures and flavors, while in mashed potatoes, the
ingredients blend into one creamy whole.

Two things happened
because of my new attention to food. First, I ate less. When you’re
savoring every bite, you don’t want to eat as much, and you’re more
aware of when you’ve had enough. It’s the first Thanksgiving when I
didn’t go back for seconds.

Second, I enjoyed it more. I never
had so much pleasure with a meal as I did with this year’s Thanksgiving.
And because I spent so much time on the flavors and textures, I can
recall them better, and relive the pleasure in memory.

If you’re a sensing type, you’re probably doing this without even being aware of it. If you’re intuitive, you’re probably not
doing this without being aware of it. Give yourself a real present this
Christmas. Let your senses revel in the sights, smells, textures and
tastes of the wonderful food all around you. You’ll eat less and enjoy
it more it more if you “super sense it.”

My husband and I were sitting in bed reading one night. For some
reason, I stopped reading and started thinking about him. After awhile I
had myself worked up into a state of gushing gratitude. I told him,
“You know what, John, you are the best husband in the world. I’m
grateful for everything you do for me and I want to do something for
you. Please tell me one thing I can do to show you how much I love you.”

“Let me finish reading my paper,” he said.

Gushy moments are not John’s thing and talking about his good
qualities just embarrasses him. He actually enjoys it more if I tease
him about his faults.

Since I can’t thank John for being John,
maybe I can thank his type. After all, he isn’t responsible for that. So
thank you, ENTP personality type, for all of the good things you have
brought to my life.

Thank you, ENTP personality type, for making
people who see goodness everywhere they look. Unlike most spouses, John
almost always comes home from work with good stories to tell about
people (“He’s a smart guy,” or “She has amazing energy.”) When we’re at
social events, I’m often surprised later at the positive qualities he
notices about people. He’s not unrealistic, and has an almost psychic
ability to spot troubled people, but most of what he sees is talent and
effort.

He does that for me too. He tells me good things
about myself that I hadn’t noticed, or ignored because I was too busy
thinking about my imperfections. Once I was telling him about a
difficult decision I had to make. He didn’t comment, so I said, “Aren’t
you going to say something?” He said, “I’m not worried. Whenever you
have a problem you run around in confusion for awhile, but then a few
days later you always have it figured out.” In my entire life, I have
never felt such relief from another person’s comment.

Thank
you, ENTP personality type, for making people that love the new and the
interesting. Living with John, I always hear about people finding clever
solutions to problems. Last week he told me about a pianist who fell in
love with Handel’s Water Music. She wanted to share her excitement with
others, so she had her grand piano put on a moving platform and towed
by a car. That way she could play the lovely tunes while being pulled
around town.

Whenever I tell him about a new idea, he is very
interested. When I was going through all of my new enthusiasm for
psychological type or homeschooling our children, he was excited right
along with me. (For an INFJ, that’s heaven.) He doesn’t devote his life
to a few new ideas, as I have, but he’ll pull them out whenever he
thinks it will help people move forward toward their goals.

His
love of the new is always there, even in the oddest situations. We were
at a dinner party on the day that Tiger Woods’ extramarital affairs hit
the news. Everyone except John was spouting off opinions. Finally
someone said, “What do you think, John?”

“I guess I hadn’t
thought about it,” he answered. “What amazed me was that my computer
alerted me there was a big story about Tiger Woods in the news today.
I’d never seen that before.”

Thank you, ENTP personality type, for making people who have so much
belief in people, and in their ability to change the world for the
better. In his work as a management consultant, people are often telling
John, “We can’t do that,” and he is often telling them, “Yes you can.”
By the time he gets done talking, they believe it too. He convinces them
they can do greater things on a much larger scale than they had ever
envisioned. (He’s learned not to do that with his family, however, at those times when they need comfort rather than inspiration.)

Thank
you, ENTP personality type, for making people who are such creative
problem solvers, who can take black and white and turn it into gold.
Once, a friend was complaining about a man who had gone into an angry
tirade during a meeting, so the group spent the rest of the meeting
trying to placate him. John surprised us by saying, “Angry people are
great for a group, because they have energy and want to do something.
You just have to help them articulate the positive goals that they stand
for, and then, ask them to help the group reach those goals.”

This
is the way many of our conversations go. I feel anxious because a
situation seems hopeless and conflicted, but a few minutes later, John
turns it into a great opportunity to make the world a better place.

When
there is a really difficult problem that most people would run from,
John runs toward it. He knows that he has the analytical skills to
understand problems thoroughly, the creative ability to find innovative
solutions, and the contagious enthusiasm to sell people on those
solutions.

He tells me that his creativity doesn’t lie in
pulling solutions out of his own mind, but in listening to people and
drawing out the solutions that are already in the back of their minds.
Then, because he gets so excited about them, he is able to get them
excited about themselves.

John and I were talking about what we
would compare each other to in nature, and I immediately said that when I
think of him, I think of blue sky. After all, most human problems lie
not in reality, but in our perceptions of reality, and no one can blow away our dark and discouraged perceptions and turn them into blue skies better than an ENTP.

Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Adler have all contributed to
our understanding of human nature. The first two names come to mind for a
wide variety of contributions.

But I think Adler’s
psychological principles are the most widely used in our day-to-day
lives, and they are the least likely to be attributed to him. To help
with this, psychologist Betty Lou Bettner has translated some of his
principles into simple language in order to teach parents how to “raise
kids who can.”* In essence she provides a system for creating more
functional, responsible, and capable families.

Here are her “Crucial C’s,” their Adlerian principle, and my take on how personality type can help people achieve those C’s.

Connect:
Everyone feels a need to belong and have a bond with others. When we
feel secure, we can reach out and make friends. These connections help
foster a concern for the welfare of the community.

Yet when
you’re the odd person out because your type is different from everyone
else’s, it can be difficult to feel this Adlerian principle of belonging
and developing social interest (a.k.a. Gemeinschaftsgefuhl).

As
an ST in counseling psychology grad school, I felt like a fish out of
water; I had difficulty feeling like I belonged there. I did not know
then that I was working against typical type in a field where NF and NT
were far more prevalent. Hindsight has given me a different
perspective, and I now understand how to get past those feelings.

Capable:
We all need to acquire skills so we can accomplish our goals. It is
important to feel confident and self-reliant and to have self-control
when things are not going our way. The Adlerians talk about turning a
felt negative into a perceived positive.

I have the privilege
of working in a program that develops community leadership in small
towns in Minnesota. A lot of my work consists of showing those who give
so much to their communities that they are highly capable; they often
don’t see it in themselves.

Many who are Introverts are
reluctant to claim their leadership skills because they have a view in
their heads that leadership belongs to Extraverts. Not true!!
Understanding that Introversion is how they gain energy is an eye opener
for many. They see the value in their thoughtful, listening style and
that knowledge helps them embrace their capabilities as they help create
healthy communities.

Count: Everyone needs to be valued
and feel like they can make a difference. Adler talks of finding
significance. The principle of social equality also prevails; we are on
a horizontal ladder, not a vertical one in terms of relationships. We
are motivated to do our best. This is different than having to win and
to best others.

Psychological type gives us each a way to both
count and to contribute to the whole. And it reminds us that other types
count and contribute as well. All types are equally good. We have a
horizontal relationship, not a vertical one in which one type is better
than another.

Courage: We all need to be hopeful,
resilient, and be willing to try. We need to cope with difficult times
and learn from them. We need “the courage to be imperfect,” and we get
at least some of that courage through encouragement.

Type gives
us a roadmap showing what strengths might develop first and most
effectively. It also reminds us where we might not do so well; we are
not perfect! And that can free us up to try things that might not come
naturally but are important for us to learn to do. We can be encouraged
to have courage.

I’ve found these four C’s to be quite helpful
in reflecting on jobs that went well and those that didn’t, and on
relationships that went well and those that didn’t. If one or more C’s
are missing, things do not always go so well. Try them out on your own
life, and see how type can help you uncover the missing C’s.

My daughter, Perrin, runs a program in mediation, and leads monthly
meetings of the mediators, all of whom are lawyers. She was telling my
husband John and me that the meetings are very discouraging because when
she introduces a new proposal, everyone just wants to air their
critical assessments. They get argumentative and judgmental; they don’t
listen to each other; the conversation goes all over the place, and when
it’s over, they haven’t decided on a single action to take.

It
seems ironic that even mediators, who are trained in getting people to
communicate and decide on a future course of action, have so much
trouble doing the same when they are together.

John, said, “It’s amazing how you can add really smart people to a room and the room becomes dumber.”

I
said, “It could also be that most lawyers are TJs. They prize their
ability to find flaws, and are usually valued for that ability in their
work. They believe that they are moving things forward with their
criticisms, and don’t see that it usually stops things in their tracks.”

John has been running groups all his working life, so Perrin asked him what she could do to make the meetings more productive.

He
told her, “Put them through an exercise that will do three things. It
will help them express their thoughts, both positive and negative. It
will help them listen to and learn from each other. Finally, it will
help them be in action when they leave.”

“Please tell me about this exercise,” Perrin said.

“Start
off by telling them that you would like to try something new in this
meeting," said John. "Tell them that people’s default setting is
naturally to be critical. That’s human – we want to make things better,
but if we only discuss the negative we can lose the excitement that we
need to pursue new projects. Tell them that you are going to present a
proposal that could make this program even more powerful, and as you
speak, you’d like them to be thinking about one question…What excites you about this proposal?

“Ask them if that makes sense to them. Get them saying yes.

“We call this ‘framing.’ It is creating the kind of positive listening you want to be speaking into.

“Then give your proposal in a 5-7 minute talk.

“When
you are finished, tell them, ‘We’re going to take two minutes so you
can write down what excites you about this proposal.’

“After two
minutes, go around the room and get people’s answers. Write them down
on a white board. When you are finished, look at the answers and ask
people what the most common themes are.

“Now ask people to take two minutes to write down the one thing they would add to make this proposal even better.

“Go around the room and gather their answers.

“Now
ask people to write down what they would commit to do, or what they
would request help with, so that we can implement this proposal by the
next meeting.

“Go around and get people’s commitments. Doing this allows everyone to leave in action, with a clear deadline."

Perrin
tried this at the next meeting of the mediators and said she had never
seen the group so animated and energized. Usually ideas for new projects
dissolve into nothing with all the talk about how “It’s complicated,”
and “We don’t have the resources.” But after asking three questions: What excites you about this proposal?,What would you add to make it even better?, and What would you commit to doing so it can be implemented by our next meeting?, everyone was focused on the goal and what they could contribute, instead of all the little things that might go wrong.

Perrin
also noticed that the commitments people made were all over the type
table. For example, some people were working on the analytics and some
were making phone calls to people. John told her, “Groups are difficult
to get focused, but once you do, it’s worth it for the synergy of the
different talents that are available to help you.”

The new project was running by the next meeting of the mediators, and they were able to celebrate what had worked for them.

“The
most important thing is to get people personally excited about a goal,
and committed to helping in a specific way,” John said. “Once you do
that, people find ways to overcome all the little obstacles along the
way.”